Blog Comments & Posts

After reading last Sunday's post on seo in pornography, and decided I'd have a bit of fun with it. Whether or not you are willing to promote pornography, there are some absolutely stellar tips hidden away in it's vast, obscure world.Disclaimer: I do not promote pornograp...

I can't cite it right now, but I remember awhile ago Matt Cutts mentioned there used to be a glitch where nofollow was passing anchor text that affected the rankings, but not link juice.

I think that alone says the nofollow system is more complicated than they make it appear. I have trouble believing they made such an elementary mistake if there wasn't a fair amount of complexity to it.

Also, I'll point out that has anyone noticed blog spam hasn't disappeared even though 90%+ of blogs have nofollowed comments? That's because it still gets you indexed quite fast. Although it's hard to track specifically due to scale, I have a tremendous issue believing that the few do-follow links in a blog spam batch are enough to speed indexing the way they appear to. IMO, there's still effect, and at least something is passed. And definitely indexing happens faster.

Pretending the link doesn't exist? Psh.

But anyways, more on track with this, I think if they can botch anchor text passing, they could definitely have missed images.

Cloaking does not require much effort once you have the system down. And it's still worthwhile (for some) due to the longtail keywords it has, and the low chance of getting caught if done properly(which this wasn't). Although honestly, if I was going to create a site that looks nie and all that jazz, I would definitely not cloak. At that point the site is an investment, and must be treated more carefully.

But ok. To make my point about it not taking effort to cloak, here is literally the procedure for the site gen I have laying around(custom, not RSSGM).

Enter 3 keywords -> Hit Enter

Go to control panel, type in domain. ->Hit Enter.

It's not about the effort it takes to cloak that makes this a waste in my eyes. It's about the effort it took to promote/create the site in the first place, only to not bother with an even competent cloaking mechanism. Oy.

Also, I'd point out that Google Translate is not the end all be all of destroying cloaking I will point out. It's perhaps 2 lines of code to check for a referrer from Google Translate, and then act accordingly.

If it were possible to hug over the internet, I would be hugging you right now.

As SEO itself gets more and more restrictive, we're going to eventually have to deal with the reality that it may be easier to get other sites penalized than rank our own site...and the day that truly happens..it's going to be messy.

I personally don't report anyone, except for 100% carbon copy scrapes of content. No artistry there, so I don't feel the kinship I do towards others.

Excellent points. I speak from experience when I say man-power is what is keeping Google away from the tidle wave of spam existing today. But even that is largely based off human reports.

Actually, today while rooting around I found scraper/cloaking siets indexed since 2002-2004 that are STILL LISTED. They just never link spammed(and pissed off forum admins), so they stayed alive. So there is apparently even weaknesses in the human side of things.

I always feel a bit odd commenting on things like this here, as I'm sure the staffers of seomoz can blow me out of the water SEO-wise(Yeah, I've examined your clients page/the links they got)

But anyways, my guess would be 2 things made digg start showing up less.

1)The speed of the site(as you mentioned). During experiments with BH sites I realized that while Google loves fresh content, it does not love content that changes 100%, everytime a Googlebot returns. Why would they send surfers to a page that will no longer contain the keyterms anymore? Digg's SEO became a victim of it's own size.

2)I think that in response to a few issues lately(especially scraper blogs that don't sanitize urls), Google stepped up the part of it's algo that makes it harder to rank above a site you link to, that doesn't link back to you. It essentially assumes that you are the authority. Especially in instances of similar content.

Could I be wrong? Yeah. I'll admit, my ninja skills aren't quite up to the level of using a grappling hook to scale Google's walls to steal this information. But it's the result of my observations. Take it with a grain of salt.

Edit/PS: Awesome post. I hadn't noticed that before, but its definitely true.

Within a lot communities, exposing a link like that is a fast way to get your arse banned. Even people who publish things like JS they found someone was using to redirect, or public examinations of the "buy viagra" serps are quickly removed by admins.

There is definitely a link monster inside of me, although I restrain it quite well most of the time. I automatically hit CTRL+END everytime I see something that looks like a mass-produced script I haven't seen before, instinctively looking for footer footprints of it for later examination. I horde away text files of every guestbook, gallery, forum, directory script, CMS, and blog examples that I have ever found. Saving them for a rainy day.

Yessir! It can be gamed. Take a look at the google SERP pages for it(here); there are definitely some indexed.

There not being a Google cache of it doesn't really matter too much in terms of what juice it can pass. But what does matter is that it has no internal references to it, so a limited amount of juice is spread from the domain itself(if any? I'm not sure)

While I see no live link to the actual site tested for, it's backlinks all appear. So in theory, plugging in a site that all of your sites link to could give all of your sites a do-follow link.

This is very true. Perhaps a central blog handling the posts with the proper keywords? I'm sure with enough support it could rank. It would just require some serious coordination to not invoke Google's wrath as a Googlebomb magnet(although their filters are easy enough to avoid, it's tricky to make people do so without appearing all dirty to Google)

I just figure one blog handling it would make the whole linking process easier.

And there are certain blogs out there that will rank towards the top for any given thing they post.

They only go after a few different sets of keywords(india/indian/dehli/discount/cheap, etc), so I have to reason that they'd be relatively easy to cover over. Especially once substantial longtail was established. By pointing out their specific nasty offers (50 directories for XYZ cost), most longtail of consequence could be covered.

If you want to work together to do this, here's what I think should be done. Find the keywords that the scammy little $20 dehli SEO's are ranking for, and OUTRANK THEM. Use an article explaining WHY the person should not be looking for this. 90% of the dirty SEO companies could be penalized into oblivion anyways if someone actually looked at their backlinks.

If I had an adsense click for every indian "bargain basement" SEO firm that scraped my post and put it on their site(in some cases, their home page),I'd be a terribly wealthy man. And guess what? They can get booted for repeated infractions like that.

So in short, outrank them at their own game(spreading knowledge in the process), and kick them outta there.

I've not tested it enough to say anything for sure, but I've noticed Yahoo maintains it in the linkdomain command as a homepage link LONG after it's gone, and they've re-cached the site. Could just be a fluke, but seems worthy of pointing out.

Obviously, I differ from a lot of the people on SeoMoz, in that I'm primarily a blackhat. So I have a comment or two here.

1)As Rishil said, you need to be a good whitehat to be a good blackhat. Automation and the extreme conditions that go into blackhat means any problem with one of your sites(improper keyword targeting, anchor text rotation, etc) has a HUGELY larger effect on the site. If you don't understand whitehat SEO, you just can't do it.

2)Blackhat SEO is not a one-size-fits-all tool. In many cases, as everyone says here, the longetivity of whitehat SEO is tremendously useful. Whenever I'm about to build a site, I examine the situation. How many long tails are there? Do I think it's within my ability to rank using whitehat? Would the monetary reward be worthwhile for the effort it would take to rank whitehat? Am I likely to get dropped from the affiliate program? Is the niche so tiny that link spam would be noticed? There's a lot of factors that weigh into everything.If you decide you DO want to try blackhat, do just that. TRY it. Do not use it on websites that you've put lots of whitehat effort into. Do not do it to the exclusion of all else. Learn about it, and continue your whitehat efforts too. Make the decision when you have all the information available.

Yahoo is what happens when not enough emphasis is placed on the contents, and in-page SEO, and too much is placed on the backlinks.

Back in the day, I used to promote for a certain affiliate program. All my domains ended up getting banned from Google, and I let the aff program lapse. Then, one day, low and behold, I got a $200 check from the site I was promoting for. Apparently a bunch of my sites were ranking top 10 in Yahoo for the keyterms. These were shoddy sites(from my early days), and there's no way they should've ranked. It was all in the backlinks.

Ok, I had to reply to this because I have a site awhile ago where I noticed a "crack" related query. "HOW LONG DOES CRACK COCAINE STAY IN YOUR SYSTEM" (yes, all in caps). I think this could be us discovering a super niche?

Aside from that, my all time favorite search(also all in caps) "SWALLOWED TINFOIL EMERGENCY".

This is very true. Although not a guarantee. I've noticed even amongst blogs that are READ by the A-List, they're generally not linked to, while the A-List does much more frequently reference and link to eachother.

I'm not saying this is their fault: it could be due to many factors, quality included, but it's just a point to consider.

I don't really ever comment on seomoz artiles, but I made the exception here. This is absolutely effin brilliant. I've played with wikipedia before, but without too much effort or success. I shrugged and moved on. I'm kind of sad about that now, reading about what might have(or might) be.